Vendors of disparate solutions are looking to leverage what they see as shortcomings in virtualisation to provide customers with comprehensive views of resources and applications in complex environments.

These organisations also say that offering to customers comprehensive views of storage, virtual machines, or optimised systems can be a good way for resellers to add on new services where they weren't competitive before.

"There's a real opportunity as the market matures for the resellers moving from initial optimisation to absolute visibility," says Ian Raper, ANZ regional director for Riverbed. "They can offer something like assessment services, to show what's going on in the customer's environment."

Raper says that Riverbed, a WAN optimisation specialist, has been building up its portfolio for years to bring application acceleration in hybrid networks. The company acquired Zeus in 2011, adding hypervisor centric application deployment control to its portfolio.

Additionally, Riverbed and Akamai will soon introduce a product they teamed up in 2011 to deliver aimed at accelerating SaaS. Raper says there isn't a built in feature to give organisations detailed and accurate look at where problems in applications occur.

"What all this is meant to do is break down problems in the network," says Raper. "it's not just about making stuff go faster when something breaks down. It's knowing where the break is. Being able to see networks as an end-to-end gives a better idea to organisations of how to solve the problem."

IT management solutions provider Quest has a similar idea about providing an "end-to-end" solutions for managing database and server migrations, and identiy and access management.

"It's components rather than application performance for monitoring," says managing director Ian Hodge. "The idea is to help give IT departments and business owners an idea of application perofrmance whether it was from databases, VDI or applications from a single pane."

Quest sees opportunity for "niche" resellers and MSPs to bring end-to-end IT management solutions to their customers. The organisation works with 50 or so regular resellers in New Zealand, and ANZ managing director Ian Hodge says there is room for "niche players" to automate monitoring tasks of customer infrastructure."A lot of what we do is about automation," Hodge says. "While you do need skills for the product, even smaller customers sometimes see lower costs from IT partners in helping them automate."

"From a technology perspective there is definitely room for resellers to expand on their current services," he says. "A five- or ten-man shop doing hosting can add live compression monitroing."

Quest sees its products, currently adopted by large IT providers and others, as helping resellers, especially MSPs, find where their margin is and how to meet their SLAs.

The company is bringing new VDI products to address Windows 7 migrations and connectivity tools to address BYOD difficulties presented to IT managers. The organisation has also announced its Quest Partner Circle programme to provide resellers training, sales resources, and marketing development funds.